Operation Stranglehold

by Dan J. Marlowe

  I couldn’t see Lisa across the way; she had blended into the shadows. I was thinking again about the two kids making it in such unusual circumstances when I heard the scrunch-scrunch of heels on gravel. I could see a man’s silhouette, bulkier than I would have chosen if I’d been in a position to do the selecting. At this time of night, though, we weren’t going to get too many chances.

  The man stopped beside a car, and I could hear him fumbling through the change in his pocket for his car keys. Then the money-tinkling sound stopped. Lisa had moved out from between the parked cars and made a small, feminine sound of distress.

  “¿Que pasa?” the man said sharply, turning toward her.

  She turned her head until the parking lot’s single overhead light was upon her face. The bulky man gave a soft, chirruping sound of appreciation. He left his car and walked toward Lisa.

  I made a quick half-circuit on the grassy belt until I was in back of him as he stood in front of the girl. He placed two fingers under her chin to tilt her head upward so he could see still better. He chuckled deeply as I tiptoed silently toward him. “¿Como está, querida?” he was saying when I stopped behind him, close enough to smell his hair tonic. “¿Que—”

  I knew he hadn’t heard me, but there is such a thing as instinct.

  I lived by it myself for years.

  The bulky man started to turn toward me.

  I had already launched my swing, aimed for under his ear, but he turned the wrong way. I missed him cleanly, and I heard the quick sucking sound of his breath as he gathered it to yell.

  I might have got him with a second swing before he bugled his awareness of the ambush. I’ll never know, because Lisa took a quick step forward and drove her knee upward into the bulky man’s groin. He gasped, then started to double up. I grabbed his shoulders and held him up long enough to hit him the shot I’d intended for him in the first place. From the look on his face I did him a real favor when I knocked him unconscious.

  “Nice save, partner,” I grunted, stooping to take hold of the man’s feet. I dragged him off the gravel onto the grass and over behind some bushes. I replaced the belt of my pants before I took the man’s car keys and money to make it look like an ordinary robbery. I ripped off his tie and belt to tie his hands and feet. I made a serviceable gag from the tail of his shirt. I didn’t want the car reported stolen too soon.

  “Quick, now,” I said to Lisa. The victim’s car was a Renault station wagon. We got into the front seat, and I backed out of the parking slot and maneuvered cautiously along the narrow alley. We made the street successfully, and I parked in front of the entrance to the Posada San Carlos, leaving the motor running. “Wait,” I told Lisa as I got out from under the wheel.

  I whistled as soon as I was inside the inn’s garden. Walter and Hazel materialized instantly from behind the thickest greenery. “Okay?” Walter asked anxiously. I knew he had Lisa in mind.

  “Thanks to your girl friend,” I said. “I blew it, but she backstopped me.”

  We all went out to the car. Walter and Hazel climbed in back, but Walter reached over the front seat to give Lisa a quick hug. “Whew!” Hazel exclaimed feelingly. “That was a long wait in that garden!”

  “What’s the flight time from Madrid to Málaga?” I asked.

  “We were talking about that,” Hazel replied. “Walter thinks it would take no more than an hour and a half in the Navion, probably not that long. If we don’t want to get there until dawn, we’ve got some time to kill.”

  “We’re certainly not going to kill it riding around on the street,” I said grimly. “We’re not wearing the right kind of clothes to be night-time joyriding in this country if anyone should take an interest.” I thought of something else. “Is the airstrip lighted, Walter?”

  “Just runway lights. There’s a switchbox on the field near the parked planes, but I know it will be locked. It always is unless Jimmy has filed to come in.”

  “If it’s a lock, it can be opened,” I said. “I was afraid we might have to park this car at one end of the runway with the headlights on to give Hazel a target to aim at on takeoff.”

  “Please!” Hazel responded in reproof. “There’s enough that can create trouble on this deal without wishing that on me.”

  I had been trying to backtrack on Julio’s route from Croswell Industries to the railroad yards, but we were in an area that looked unfamiliar to me. “Better take over the navigation of this vehicle, Walter,” I said. “Get us to Croswell. The sooner we’re off the street the better.”

  He checked street signs and had me change direction.

  “How much air time does the Navion provide with a full load of gas?” I went on.

  “We were talking about that, too,” he answered. “With its twin tanks, I figure three hours, maybe a little more or a little less. That’s twice what we need to make it. Say, what about the night watchman at Croswell? Do you think we can hide out on the grounds for several hours, car and all?”

  “No, I don’t think so,” I replied. “We’ll play this hand differently. We’ll drive right up to the warehouse side door with the headlights blazing, so he’ll think it’s something legitimate. Then when he comes out to see what it is, we’ll scoop him. Does he have any time clocks to punch?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “I’ll check on it.”

  We rode the balance of the distance in silence. I kept trying to think of things that might go wrong. If Hazel just got the plane into the air, I felt we’d make it. If she didn’t, well, nothing else needed to go wrong.

  “Next block,” Walter interrupted my thoughts.

  I slowed and watched for the Croswell driveway. I passed it when I came to it, then turned down the alley I’d used the night I met Julio and Consuelo at the warehouse. I pulled in beside the big overhead door, and we sat there with the car lights on. After a minute I blinked them off and on three times.

  “He could be almost anywhere,” Walter said in a husky whisper.

  “Keep that sombrero pulled down if there’s any chance he might know you,” I returned. “We don’t want—”

  “There’s someone!” Lisa exclaimed.

  A nondescript figure appeared in the headlights, dressed almost exactly as we were. “That’s him!” Walter said tensely. We got out of the car. The night watchman had just started to palaver when we one-twoed him from opposite sides. Walter caught him before he hit the ground.

  “Turn out the car lights,” I said to Lisa. We wanted to attract no more attention. “No time-clock keys,” I observed to Walter as I searched the watchman for the warehouse key. “That’s all to the good. We’ll take him inside and stow him where they’ll find him in the morning.”

  We left him on a blanket in the center of the floor where they couldn’t miss him. I took a look around the interior of the warehouse to see if there was anything we could use. I couldn’t find anything, so we went outside and locked up again. We got back in the car, and I drove slowly, lights out, through the Croswell property, following Walter’s directions.

  The elongated wings of the Croswell air fleet loomed up in front of us, and I pulled in beside the smallest shape. “Show me that switchbox, Walter,” I said as we all got out of the car. It wasn’t a pitch-black night; there was light enough to see.

  Hazel had gone directly to the Navion. “Earl!” she murmured from the wing-root alongside the door. “It’s locked!”

  “Let me take a look at it,” I said. We changed positions on the wing-root. The lock was similar to those found on kids’ toolboxes; a joke. I started to get down to walk to the Renault to open the trunk and look for tools, then reconsidered. I fished out my handy-dandy, all-purpose, four-bladed pocket knife and worked the catch of the lock free in less than a minute.

  We changed positions again and I boosted Hazel through the Navion’s door. She fumbled around in a compartment on the copilot’s side, and a quick glow of light announced that she’d found a flashlight. She muffled the beam with her fingers o
ver the glassed-in bulb to diffuse the glare, then leaned down over the compartment again. She straightened up almost at once. “Charts!” she announced in relief, holding them up.

  “That’s great, baby,” I said. “Go to school on this thing now. Dawn comes early, so we should probably leave here no later than three fifteen. That gives you a couple of hours before takeoff. Walter, show me that switchbox.”

  When we found it, I didn’t need any more time to open it than with the door of the Navion. I gave the switch a quick on-and-off flick. The runway lights, mounted on eighteen-inch-high inverted cones, glowed for a second and then went out again. They had indicated to all of us the direction of the airstrip.

  “Let’s push the plane out on the runway,” I said to Walter. He folded down the copilot’s seat and helped Lisa into the back while I kicked the chocks from under the wheels. We rolled the Navion out onto the strip, between the light standards, aiming it towards the end of the runway. I carried the chocks over and replaced them.

  “You sit in front with Hazel while you’re working out the bugs in the flight plan,” I told Walter. I crawled into the back beside Lisa. From the expression on her pretty face, she had plenty of reservations about this type of airplane ride.

  I looked over Hazel’s right shoulder. She was bent forward, examining switches and levers on the instrument panel in the glow of her hand-shielded flashlight. “How’s it look, baby?” I asked.

  “I wish they’d standardize these things!” she said in an exasperated tone.

  “You mean the wings don’t always go on the sides or the tail in the back?”

  “You know what I mean! Except for grouping the flight instruments together on the panel, everything else is just scattered around wherever there’s space. Look at the switches for one lousy single-engine, five-passenger airplane. The thing is wired up like a miniature electrical substation.”

  For a fact, what I could see of the instrument panel didn’t look too much like the Cessna. Walter’s body kept me from seeing the differences if any on the copilot’s side.

  “Ahhhh, here it is!” Hazel exclaimed.

  There was a click. but nothing miraculous happened.

  “What was the important discovery?” I asked.

  “The master switch. It’s like the main one on a fuse box. Now I’ve got power from the battery through the lines.” Hazel moved her hand to subsidiary switches. Lights glowed on the instruments imbedded in the black, padded dash. A bright dome light came on, and Hazel quickly turned it off. “Well, we know where that one is,” she said.

  I settled back. I’d have said something comforting to Lisa if I could have thought of anything. I could have used some comforting myself. The closer we came to takeoff in this little air-bug, the chancier the whole thing seemed.

  Time passed. I heard Hazel and Walter muttering at each other over the charts they had spread over their knees. I dozed off a couple of times only to wake up with a jerk, startled at the confined space.

  A squishing sound roused me from another fitful doze. “What’s that?” I inquired.

  “Priming the engine,” Hazel said. “We’re about ready.”

  I looked at my watch, then tapped Walter on the shoulder. “Change places now,” I told him. He climbed down to the ground and I joined him. He stepped up on the wing-root again and scrambled into the back with Lisa. I looked in the door at Hazel. “You can’t take too long warming it up,” I warned her. There’s no such thing as a little bit of noise with an airplane engine.

  “I know,” she said. She set the brakes, then pressed the starter button. The propellor started churning air and the starter whined uncommonly loud. The engine fired, then chugged painfully while Hazel jiggled the throttle. It caught suddenly, faded again, and finally picked up smoothly and steadily. The little plane vibrated roughly.

  I dashed to the switchbox and flicked on the runway lights. Back at the plane, I kicked the chocks away, and despite the brakes, the Navion started to creep along the runway as Hazel poured power to it. I dived into the cabin, sorted myself out, and clamped on my seat belt.

  Hazel advanced the throttle slowly. The engine revved up nicely until half-throttle position was reached. Then it backfired violently, causing stuttering vibrations before it picked up again. Even I could see that the oil and cylinder gauges showed the engine to be unready for reliable operation, but I touched Hazel’s elbow and pointed. A set of headlights had turned in from the highway and were heading toward the plane as it sat on the runway.

  Hazel’s firm chin jutted. She shoved the throttle full forward and released the brake. The runway lights began to move by. Hazel gripped the control wheel with both hands. I groped for the handle so that I’d be able to pull up the wheels when we were airborne, as I always did in the Cessna, but the handle wasn’t there.

  “I can’t find the wheel-up handle!” I shouted above the noise of the engine.

  “Forget it for now!” Hazel shot back. “Can’t risk pulling the wrong one.”

  The lights were going by faster, but we still didn’t have airspeed. I wondered uneasily if we were going to run out of runway. Hazel was hunched over, trying to keep the rolling plane straight between the lights. I could tell we were weaving by the way the lights ahead kept drifting back and forth across our nose. The rumble of the landing gear became less pronounced as we continued to pick up speed, but we still hadn’t lifted off.

  I opened my mouth when I saw the lights end a perilously short distance ahead of us, but Hazel had seen it, too. She dragged back on the wheel, and the plane surged upward for a brief instant, then settled down again. She tried it again, and the wheels left the ground. At the same instant there was a heavy bang underneath, and the plane gave a shuddering lurch just before it became airborne.

  I looked across at Hazel. “I drifted off the runway and hit one of those damn runway lights with the landing gear!” she yelled to me.

  But we were climbing steadily.

  “Better than catching a wingtip!” I shouted back jubilantly. “We’d have cartwheeled for forty-five miles.”

  The jewellike lights of Madrid dropped away behind and to the left as we climbed into the star-studded night sky. Hazel throttled back at 4000 feet and wiped the back of her hand across her mouth. The engine sound was perceptibly lower. “That’s what’s known as a cardiac arrest takeoff,” she said.

  “It affects me more like involuntary diarrhea,” Walter said from the back seat.

  “You two doing all right back there?” Hazel asked.

  “Fine,” Walter said. “Fine.” He didn’t really sound like he meant it, though.

  “Let’s see about that landing gear lever,” Hazel said. She felt around under the seats between us, then took my hand and guided it to a straight bar on the opposite side of where it was on the Cessna. “Pull up,” she said. I did, and a moment later there was a grinding crunch. “Oh-oh, the gear’s only halfway up. Must have messed it up when we hit the light. Would you believe a lame-duck landing?”

  Then she leaned forward and studied the instrument panel intently. She caught my eye and pointed to the fuel gauge. There were two needles on it, one each for the separate tanks located in each wing. The right hand needle was almost at the empty mark. “The smash must have ruptured the right hand tank,” Hazel said soberly. “We’ve only got half our fuel.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means we can’t miss our target by much because we won’t have fuel to search for it. The flight’s about an hour to an hour and a quarter, and that’s about the limit of one tank.”

  Nobody seemed to feel it necessary to comment upon her analysis. The plane droned on through the darkness, although over in the east the first faint tinges of pink could be seen in the sky. On the ground, of course, it was still pitch black.

  Hazel pointed ahead of us some time later. “I hope that’s water out there, Earl, but I always thought the Mediterranean was blue.”

  I raised up to look over the nose of
the plane. Ahead and below us was a gray mass that didn’t have the solid look of water. As the light strengthened in the eastern sky I could see that the cause of Hazel’s concern was a fog bank that stretched in both directions as far as the eye could see. At its near edge was not seacoast, but rocky-looking land.

  I looked at Hazel. She shook her head grimly. “There’s holes in it, but we don’t have the gas to play hopscotch,” she said. “We can forget about landing near Málaga. We’ve got to get down on anything that’ll have us. I don’t think we’ve got more than another twenty minutes worth of gas.”

  “Maybe it will clear at the water’s edge,” I said.

  “Let’s hope so,” she answered, throttling back to extend our air-time. We flew over the gray mass for another ten minutes. “It looks like it extends clear to Africa,” Hazel said then.

  Through a gap in the fog bank I caught a glimpse of blue water. Hazel saw it, too. She banked the plane to change course. If we had to sit down in water we didn’t want it to be too deep. Another hole in the fog density made me think it was breaking up, but would it be in time? It closed up immediately, but then another opened, and I saw water edging against a white blur. I jabbed Hazel’s arm. “Isn’t that a beach?”

  She whipped the Navion around so the spot would be visible from her side, at the same time dropping down two thousand feet. Then she shook her head. “You had me excited, Horseman, but it won’t do. Take another look.”

  The fog was definitely thinning, but what it revealed was far from helpful. I’d seen a beach, all right, but a very narrow one close to jagged-looking cliffs. Rough outcroppings peppered the stretch of sand visible, and clusters of oddly striped, boxlike assemblages dotted the rest of the limited open space. “What the hell are those things?” I demanded.

  “Canvas cabanas,” Walter replied. He had been staring down at the beach through his window.